Bimodal Approach

A bimodal approach combines the known with the unknown, facilitating businesses to explore and experiment without losing speed.

Itera is working with numerous customers facing a need for radical changes in the context of digital transformation. In our work, we have used and created strong results by using the Bimodal IT practice. Bimodal IT focuses on the practice of managing two separate, but coherent styles of work: one focused on predictability; the other on exploration. The model was originally launched by Gartner several years ago, and it has had a significant effect on how many companies work.

Mode 1 – exploiting what is known

Mode 1 is optimized for areas that are more predictable and well-understood. It focuses on exploiting what is known, while renovating the legacy environment into a state that is fit for a digital world. Waterfall methods are still used in some legacy projects, but our main focus is on using agile methods in development and application maintenance projects. Itera believes that for many companies there is significant potential for improving the returns on application maintenance investments, and we have therefore recently also launched a new maintenance concept that can result in significant savings and improved business results.

Mode 2 – exploring new areas of business potential

Mode 2 is exploratory, experimenting to solve new problems and optimized for areas of uncertainty. This enables a greater focus on creating superior customer experiences, while significantly reducing time to market. These initiatives often begin with a hypothesis that is tested and adapted during a process involving short iterations, potentially adopting a minimum viable product (MVP) approach. This method is integrated into Itera's Lean Service Design methodology and used in many of the initiatives that we have run in recent years.